Official PlayStation Malta Site - Royale talk: part one

You've come back to direct a Bond ten, eleven years on. You had a new Bond with GoldenEye and you've got a new Bond, Daniel Craig, with Casino Royale. What was it like this time?

Well it was a different concept in that GoldenEye was very much a traditional Bond, I think. It was a new actor playing Bond but nevertheless the story was very much along the normal Bond lines, except that in that story 006 was the bad guy. You still had the bad guys trying to destroy the world, all the usual scenarios, whereas this is very much more down to earth. So no more exploding control rooms, no more incredulous action sequences.
You were credited with reinvigorating Bond back in 1995. At the time of GoldenEye there was speculation about whether it would succeed. What is it with you and new Bonds?

Well, it's only my second time! And don't forget with GoldenEye it was an eight-year gap between that and Licence to Kill, the Tim Dalton movie. Pierce [Brosnan] was just perfect for it. And secondly, the public were starved of Bond. There was the gap because of a legal problem at the time, so they couldn't make Bond. So a long time had passed and everyone liked Pierce and I think the audience was looking forward to another Bond.

Were you involved in the process of choosing Daniel Craig as the new Bond?

Oh yes, we all had to agree on who would be Bond - Barbara [Broccoli], Michael [Wilson], all of us. I mean, we saw a lot of people. There was endless speculation about it but we had to go through everyone and we tested a lot of people and there were other names mentioned and finally it came back to Daniel. We knew he was the right man for the job; it was as simple as that.

What did you like about Daniel?

Well, for a start, he's obviously a very, very good actor. And another reason was that he fitted the concept we had and he certainly fitted the book and the more realistic approach much better than anybody else. Casino Royale is a rather interesting book. It's his [Ian Fleming] first book, written in 1953 and it was set in the Cold War with Smersh involved - Fleming's version of the KGB. It was a very realistic book, too. It doesn't feature outrageous situations, outrageous action and Bond is very real, too. He is not the tuxedo wearing, womanising master spy that we have been given in the movies.

So he's not the sophisticate we know now?

No, he's not and basically he has just been given his first task having been given his 007 status and he is still a bit green around the edges. For example he has to kill someone and the killing is tough and it's messy and he finds it very disturbing. It's also interesting in the book, he drinks way too much and he smokes about 70 cigarettes a day! (laughs)

Times change...

Oh they do. So he is vulnerable and a dark character and has a dark side to him. He doesn't find it easy. He's very much a misogynist and explains why in the book - actually there's a very good description of why he detests affairs and he actually talks about the steps you go through and it's so true, how it all ends up leaving a nasty taste in your mouth. And of course Fleming at the time was about to be married to a woman he didn't want to be married to, so all of that sort of fed into the book.

You've obviously made the story more contemporary.

Well, we've had to because the whole first half of the book is all based on the Cold War. In the book Le Chiffre is a communist bagman, an agitator, for the KGB and works in the south of France and is being sent money to filter through the unions and cause disruption to the industry down there in case there's a Russian invasion. What happens is that he invests some of this money in a brothel and three months later the law on prostitution changes and he's left penniless having spent the KGB's money. So he decides to generate this game of Baccarat - we use Texas Hold 'em [poker] in the film - in order to win the money back. So that remains.

In the film Le Chiffre is a banker to the world's terrorists, his job is to take cash from various terror organisations and launder that money, invest that money and later the terrorist organisation will get the money from him whenever they want it. And of course the governments try to crack down on this, there is an organisation in Paris which does exactly that. And what happens is Le Chiffre uses the money he has acquired from one particular terrorist organisation to play the stock market and then of course he loses it and has to get the money back. So it's a variation on the book. Bond is on his trail, of course.

Which performances of Daniel's convinced you he was your Bond?

Well, Layer Cake has a certain charm about it despite being about drugs. He is very charming in it. And normally you associate him with slightly heavier roles like Enduring Love, The Mother, Sylvia, and actually I thought Munich was one of the best things he's done although he's hardly got a line in it. He's bursting with vitality in that role, he's there and you can't help but watch him. And as I've said, this Bond had to be darker and Daniel can convey that, rather like [Sean] Connery in a way. He has that dark quality and Connery had it - that presence on the screen of someone who could definitely take care of himself. Daniel has that too.

Did you agree that the franchise needed invigorating?
Yes, I did. You know, the last one took tons of money but as Barbara and Michael said "how long can we go on like this?" How long could you go on with that "man taking over the world" scenario? In the end, they just start to repeat themselves.

Did other contemporary movies feed into that decision that Bond had to reinvent itself? The Bourne films with Matt Damon have been very successful.

They are up-to-date movies. I love The Bourne Supremacy and Paul Greengrass is a very talented director, he has that documentary style which gives it a great sense of realism. But, yes there's that to think about. Also, I think Cubby Broccoli always wanted to make Casino Royale so that was one of his passions to get the rights to the book and make a movie but he died before that was possible. So Barbara and Michael saw it had become available and leapt on it.

This interview was conducted in London while Martin Campbell was editing Casino Royale.
Casino Royale is released on Blu-ray Disc and UMD on 19th March; for more information please visit Sony Pictures' offical website.